LitFest salutes Nadine Gordimer’s sharp pen

•Robyn SassenAt the opening session of this year’s Mail & Guardian Literary Festival, journalist Maureen Isaacson spelled out the basis of her friendship with the late Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer: “Never explain, never complain, never apologise.”

Celebrating Gordimer was the cornerstone of the festival, hosted last weekend at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre. The programme took its audience on forays into left- and right-wing history, into the beauty of Johannesburg and of Afrikaans, before contemplating what academic freedom means and casting a glance at the future and the past.

Devoid of parallel sessions, the festival was pared down, but direct. The first panel was on Gordimer and began with a beautiful reading of her arguably perfect short story ‘The Train From Rhodesia’, by theatre personality Fiona Ramsay.

“Seven weeks after her death,” said Isaacson, “I still hear her voice in my head: ‘Too bloody old. There’s no achievement in getting old.’

“She was many things. She was funny. She was firm and strict and definite. She gave herself licence to say what she wanted and to take the consequences. She could shut down a conversation, but she could shine a light that showed the way.

“She characterised herself as a corrupt child, a mimic. And described walking out of what she called ‘the ugly gates’ of her Springs convent school and heading for a nearby strip of veld where she would lie and catch butterflies. She did what was not permissible.”

“She was always telling the same story from different angles,” Isaacson added, conjuring up the “heat of shame” in ‘The Train From Rhodesia’, in which a white couple bargains with an elderly black craftsman for a small sculpted lion. “It spells out the attitudes that still prevail today.

“Her sharp pen bit through the artifice. She was not afraid to name the morbid symptoms of violent crime, theft, bribery on the highest levels, gaping inequality, which was at the bottom of it all. She never gave up on hope.”

Zimbabwean-born Bongani Kona, a contributing editor at the Chimurenga Chronic, first encountered Gordimer’s work in a library. “In ‘Writing And Being’, she speaks about how as she came into consciousness, she came to understand that the society she was living in was unjust. She couldn’t claim it for herself. She couldn’t call anyone in it ‘my people’. Neither the whites nor the blacks.”

The idea that “fiction is meant to do something greater rather than entertain” really moved Kona. “I fell in love with Nadine’s style of writing with ‘The World Of Strangers’,” said a veteran of the Congress of South African Writers (Cosaw), Colin Smuts, who nicknamed the diminutive writer ‘Big Mama’ because of her great mind. “But what really bombed me was her description of Johannesburg. Her work was always now.”

“There are some conversations we need to be having to face up to our dark past of historical injustices,” said the 2014 winner of the Caine prize for African writing, Kenyan-born Okwiri Oduor. “Nadine teaches me a writer’s duty is to witness and speak the truth and be strong.”

She said the most horrific thing about a violent society is people who become accustomed to the violence. “I am acutely aware of my own privileges. And of the luxury of sadness.”

– mg.co.za

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